Tip#3

Nutrient-Rich Eating 

Eating a nutrient rich diet is all about optimizing the quality of the foods you eat. You can make a choice between eating a meal packed with vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory properties, fiber, water, protein, fats and carbohydrates....or a food with very little of any of those. Athletes who choose to eat a diet filled with powerful and health enhancing nutrients will have the energy available to them to perform at their best.  

Making  the most of the foods you choose to eat will ensure that you will perform at your best and recover the most efficiently!  Whenever possible, choose foods, combinations of foods and meals that contain nutrients that will help fuel your body and/or help you recover from the high level of training that you are doing on a day to day basis.

For example, instead of grabbing a rice cake in the morning for breakfast, choose whole grain toast with avocado, arugula and flax seeds....

I know everyone has heard the motto for Skittles to “Eat the Rainbow”, but as athletes, we want to apply this concept to our fruit and vegetable intake. IN the Nutrition 101 Blog Series, we covered all the macronutrients.  Fruits and vegetables are our main source of the micronutrients and SUPER important for athletic performance.

For a normal person, the USDA recommends 4-5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day. Now remember, we are athletes and we learned in the first few posts of the Sports Nutrition 101 series that being an athlete means that we have different nutritional needs than normal people. That being said, our goal is to get 8-9 servings of fruits and vegetables a day to optimize our athletic performance. 

Now this many fruits and vegetables may seem like a lot in theory, but if you think about just trying to eat a rainbow, or many different colors, of F + V each day, you can easily meet the target range of intake. 

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